


Buffy vs. Dollhouse

by alizarin_nyc



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-31
Updated: 2009-10-31
Packaged: 2017-11-05 23:37:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alizarin_nyc/pseuds/alizarin_nyc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Buffy breaks into the Dollhouse like nobody’s fucking business.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Buffy vs. Dollhouse

Buffy breaks into the Dollhouse like nobody’s fucking business.

She kicks ass first, takes names later, if at all. Giles goes to Adele’s office to confront her. They go way back, Oxford or Watcher’s Council or something. They’ll probably catch up over tea. Buffy doesn’t care. She’s got plenty of heads to punch and some of them even fight back.

She finally finds Faith in the chair. She knows about the chair. It frightens her and she’s not easily undone by anything these days. But she knows what it’s like to let someone get in her head. Luckily she packed several different cans of ass-whipping and left her sympathy clutch at home. She can sort out how she feels about Faith later, too.

But Faith isn’t Faith and whoa, that’s weird. Faith is looking up puppy-like at this shaggy-haired guy for clues and now Shaggy’s looking at Buffy and saying You Can’t Be Here. He’s the black-holed heart of the operation, she knows, so Buffy spins him and pins him against his machines and radios her location to the others.

Shaggy’s whining like a bitchy little girl so Buffy cuts off his airflow for a while. “Was I asleep?” Faith asks her, all wide-eyed innocence. “Not really,” Buffy says, and Faith looks totally confused.

Xander shows up and takes Shaggy off Buffy’s hands. He explains carefully what will happen if he does not do exactly as they ask. “N-n-name’s Topher.” Xander tells Topher what to do in order to live a pain-free existence. He’s not wearing his eye patch which really helps with the terrorizing and stuff.

Faith is lowered into the chair once more. She comes to and Topher says “Hello Caroline.”

“Uh, uh,” Buffy says. “You don’t get to speak. And her name is Faith, and you have no _idea_ who she is.”

“I’ve got it from here,” Xander says, once Faith slides out of the chair and collapses in Buffy’s arms. “Make sure she’s okay.” He turns to Topher. “We have our work cut out for us.”

 

 

Buffy and Faith go to Adele’s office where they first look out over Los Angeles. Faith has no recollection how she got here from Cleveland. “How long?” she asks.

“Two years,” Buffy tells her. Why sugarcoat it?

“I’ve been missing from my own life for two years.”

“We thought you were in Cleveland. We thought you weren’t returning phone calls for your own reasons. When we realized, we spent a good eight months searching and the last two weeks planning this assault. It wasn’t easy but damn. Pretty satisfying on my end.”

Faith smiles at that, like she’s supposed to. “Good ol’ B. Never run from a fight.”

“Never.”

“Why did that guy call me Caroline?”

“Someone created a persona for you that everyone thought was really you-you. But you know, you’re the real you now. Again. For good this time.”

“I wish I knew what that meant,” Faith says.

 

 

Later, Buffy busts into Adele’s liquor cabinet and she and Faith are drinking the most expensive whiskey she can find.

“Whiskey,” Faith says solemnly. “ _Whiskey_.”

“Uh huh,” Buffy says. “So vamps. Still a problem. New mutated vamp-demon thing. Bigger problem. We could have used you.” Buffy feels a little uncomfortable. She swigs the whiskey and pours another. Faith looks older. She doesn’t look like she’s had a good time these past years, whether she remembers it or not.

“I was a sex toy,” Faith says suddenly. “I… how many showers do I have to take to feel clean again?” It’s not a question so Buffy tries to put on her best sympathetic face. Faith carefully inspects her private parts by lifting the waistband of her yoga pants. Who dressed these dolls, anyway?

“Am I supposed to remember anything?” She asks.

“No. I don’t think so. I think you’re supposed to be like, mind-wiped. But your files said you were remembering the Caroline persona and that you were piecing things together even after you were wiped clean and they didn’t understand why. Probably because you’re a Slayer and our brains are wired differently.”

“Creepy.” Faith pulls the blanket over her shoulders closer to her and shrinks into it like it’s a cocoon. Buffy gets it. It’s why she made so many people bleed when she came to the rescue. “How did I get in here?”

“I don’t know,” Buffy says. “Maybe you’ll remember later. Maybe they’ll tell us. Maybe we’ll make them tell us.”

“Uh huh,” Faith says. But she doesn’t sound interested in it at all.

 

 

Giles has Adele totally in his thrall.

And how weird is that? That Giles has “thrall.” Buffy watches Faith stare openly at him, noting the closely cropped salt and pepper hair, the lean masculine figure in better clothes, the contacts. He doesn’t fidget. He’s changed, too.

Faith lets him brush her shoulder and nod at her. Adele looks slightly disheveled, as if Giles had been less than a gentleman with her. Buffy smothers a grin.

“She’s agreed to help us, as has former FBI agent Paul Ballard,” Giles tells Buffy.

“But not Boyd.”

“No. He suggested that trading in one organization with complicated motives for another was well above his pay grade. We’re not the white hats in his estimation. He’s cleverer than we gave him credit for.”

“I could have told you that,” Adele says smugly.

“Right. Let’s finish moving in.”

“I’m sorry, moving in?” Faith is on her feet, looking from one to the other.

“We need a new headquarters,” Buffy says.

“Echo!” Paul Ballard is at the door, and his face is swollen and bloody from Buffy’s earlier beatdown, but she doesn’t feel bad about it.

“She’s not Echo. Or Caroline. Get that through your skull. She’s not yours.”

“I’m sorry, sorry,” Ballard says, his face going all sympathetic. Buffy just thinks he’s pathetic. He moves toward Faith and she doesn’t flinch. Good for her. “Are you okay?”

“Five by five,” Faith says, and turns her back on him.

 

 

Several of the former dolls want to help them. They won’t deal with Adele, naturally, but they warm up to Giles immediately. Dismantling Rossum Corp. and being mind-wiped and imprinted for actual save-the-world missions appeals to some of them. Mostly, Buffy thinks they’re probably too damaged to go back to society.

Faith doesn’t stay. She kisses Buffy goodbye, on the lips and everything. “Thanks for saving my ass. But I don’t belong to you guys either. Fight the good fight and I’ll be back someday.”

“Okay,” Buffy says. She shrugs but she hurts and she doesn’t really know why. Every year the job gets emptier and emptier and the humans are just as bad as the demons and sometimes the demons are better.

As much as she wants to imprint Topher for a sex-worker gig, she lets Giles keep him around for the sake of the machinery. But he’s never unsupervised and he has no special privileges. Eventually one of the former dolls kills him in his sleep. They don’t worry about who did it.

The apocalypse is coming and there’s a vamp nest in Stockton and Paul Ballard is hopelessly in love with her and now that they know about Alpha, he knows about them and there’s danger everywhere.

She’s too busy to worry about Faith and her lost years. But she’ll never stop wondering.  



End file.
